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Defendant in court: Investigators believe he was a lone wolf
Photo: BORIS ROESSLER / POOL / EPA
After he had presented his view of things for about an hour in front of the district court in Frankfurt am Main, Alexander M. was still concerned about the widest possible dissemination of his defense strategy.
M. told the presiding judge that the written statement, which he had previously read from several tightly printed DIN A4 pages, could "be spread widely."
Explicitly also to the press, added the 54-year-old Berliner and looked supportively up at the journalists on the gallery of courtroom 165.
The message that M. wanted to send out to the world that day was as clear as it was bold: he hadn't written a single racist, insulting and inflammatory threatening email that he was accused of.
And other allegations, such as possession of child and youth pornography or resistance to state authority are nothing but perfidious insinuations and distortions by the Frankfurt public prosecutor.
Alexander M. has been on trial since this week because he is said to be the author of an unprecedented series of threatening letters with the sender "NSU 2.0".
The unemployed IT technician is said to have sent 116 e-mails, faxes and short messages from August 2018 to March 2021: desert death and bomb threats, racist and sexist insults, often combined with NS greetings, Nazi symbols and self-designations such as »SS- Lieutenant Colonel".
The investigators believe he is a lone perpetrator who, with rhetorical skill, is said to have obtained personal data from his victims by calling police stations and registration offices in order to further unsettle them.
Some of the recipients of his letter, including the Frankfurt lawyer Seda Başay-Yıldız or the Left Chairwoman Janine Wissler, assume that M. must have had willing helpers with the Hessian police.
The most important indication of this is an unusually long and detailed data retrieval about Başay-Yıldız from a service computer in the 1st Frankfurt police station - immediately before the lawyer received the first of many threatening letters on August 2, 2018.
Chasing in the dark web
Alexander M. tried very hard on Thursday to use these doubts about the single perpetrator thesis for himself.
It couldn't have been all of that, he claimed.
For example, he did not have the daily police passwords that were necessary to access the data.
In general, as a Berliner who had never set foot in the state of Hesse before his arrest, it was impossible for him to have learned all the many official secrets of the Hessian security authorities that are evident from the threatening letters.
His version of the story goes like this: in mid-2019, he was invited to join a chat group on the dark web, in which there was aggressive political discussion and agitation against the lawyer Başay-Yıldız.
This group, to which frustrated Hessian police officers must have belonged, was responsible for the threatening letters with the sender "NSU 2.0".
The group was expressly asked to write such letters as well.
After a period of rather passive membership, M. claims to have actively distanced himself from the group.
He called the threatening letters against Başay-Yıldız and others "shabby behavior" in court.
At some point, the thesis of a "Jewish world conspiracy" was put forward in the chat.
He contradicted this in a chat discussion, after which there was a break.
He left the chat group in 2020, but he could still name some members to the investigators.
His condition for this: the proceedings against him must be stopped and he must be included in a "witness protection program".
problems with women?
He didn't
The public prosecutor's office and the court showed little willingness to respond to this demand.
In addition, they would have had a lot of questions about the descriptions and attempts at explanation by the accused.
But he would not answer questions about his statements, said M. – his lawyers had advised him against it.
Instead, on the second day of the hearing, he got caught up in heated arguments, for example with Başay-Yıldız's legal representative, who is involved in the trial as a joint plaintiff.
The lawyer had pointed out that the threatening letters, in addition to racist and hate speech, also contained many sexist and misogynist passages and that this spoke strongly for M. as the main perpetrator.
M. then snapped back: "She's crazy!" He had no problems with women.
The public prosecutor considers the evidence against M. to be quite overwhelming.
When a special task force from the Hessian State Criminal Police Office arrested him in May last year after lengthy investigations in his Berlin apartment in Soldiner Kiez, his computer was still running.
The police experts found numerous fragments of his threatening letters, as well as references to searches for the threatened people.
M. also had access to the mailbox at a Russian-Dutch internet service provider through which the threats had been sent.
more on the subject
116 Right-wing extremist and racist messages: How the police found out about the threatening letter writer "NSU 2.0" By Matthias Bartsch
Suspect in the "NSU 2.0" case: The hate story of Alexander Horst M.
Prosecutor Sinan Akdogan said on Thursday that many of the allegations made in Ms's statements could be quickly refuted.
Alleged official secrets, which according to M. could only come from Hessian police officers from the chat group, are in fact not at all, but newspaper knowledge that can be researched on the Internet.
Garbage apartment
According to their own statements, the investigators have so far had no indication that M. was part of an organized network.
During his interrogation after the arrest, the Berliner had stated that he had "excessive social contacts".
In fact, according to the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office, he is an isolated loner who, in a neglected and littered apartment, was mainly busy with his computer, playing chess on the Internet and writing threatening letters.
He only maintained regular contact with his mother, a former teacher who also lives in Berlin.
The public prosecutor's office stated that no other reference persons could be identified, and a questioning of the residents of the house did not give a different impression.
Instead, investigators came across a whole series of relevant criminal records in Ms' previous life.
It was always about threats, insults and fraud, and there were also convictions for physical harm and possession of child pornography.
M. has already used the scam he is said to have used as "NSU 2.0" several times: He pretended to be a detective at authorities, police stations and also at a bank in order to get personal data from other people.
The Hessian investigators found notes on his computer in which he logged the results of such inquiries and made notes for future calls: "Never call more than the StA," he wrote, for example, behind the contact details of a police station in Brandenburg - StA is that Abbreviation for prosecutor.
Prone to sinister threats
The brute right-wing extremist slang and penchant for sinister threats have also been on record in M's life for almost three decades: "Old Jew pig, old bastard, I'll wring your neck, I'll send people up to tidy up your apartment," he says loudly In an earlier judgment, at the end of 1992, he threatened a then 67-year-old woman who was giving him English lessons: "Now you have to die," he said to the woman on the phone and threatened "gassing."
In addition, the investigators found a lot of relevant literature in Ms. Berlin's apartment.
Books with titles like: "Manipulate - but correctly", "The psychology of persuasion" or "The art of unscrupulous rhetoric".
M explained that none of this had anything to do with his proceedings in Frankfurt. Instead, the Hessian investigators tried to divert attention from their own responsibility for the series of threatening letters.
In this undignified game, he merely played the role of a "useful idiot who can be blamed for everything."